Small Business Project Management, part 1

Regardless of the size of a business, project management should be an important part to conducting business. Project management can be used to convey the process for managing technical project or handling customers. Ideally, as a business owner, you should have a generic plan in place that you follow when developing your project plans.

Case in point, as a small business owner, one of the processes that I have chosen to use the Deming cycle. The Deming cycle has four-parts:

The Deming cycle is an four-part problem-solving process that project managers use to monitor the continued progress of a project. It is considered a simple way of conducting quality control for your projects while at the same time increasing your awareness of perfecting your processes. The four simple steps for Deming’s cycle are:

• Plan: Identify the focus for you project improvement plan. Create the objectives and goals that you want to accomplish as part of your project plan.
• Do: Put into action the project plan that you have created.
• Check: Make sure to track and evaluate how things are going and compare the compiled results against your objectives and goals. Then develop a report about the outcome.
• Act: Activate any changes that you deem necessary for improving the outcome. What you do in this step is review everything that you have done so far and then make changes according to what will help you improve the project plan so that you have a better outcome the next time around.

Integrating the Deming cycle into your small business, is a straight-forward process that will be discussed in the next installment in this series.

Image credit: Kim Beasley (creator)